Last night I had to do some World of Warcraft maintenance, in that I had allowed my Emissary quest to stack up for three days and was about to start losing them. I fairly joylessly burned through those, then decided to take a chance at a 370 piece of loot from the Warfront that is now open to Horde players. I still find those pretty fun but ultimately wound up with disappointment in that I got a 370 item in a slot I already had one. You would think they could factor in the gear that the player has when they give those extremely limited time rewards like that… because since it is ultimately a shot at loot every three weeks… please give us something we can use.
From there I popped into Monster Hunter World where I largely did some maintenance there as well. I spent most of the night farming up zenny so that I could buy the Power Charm, which is an item that takes up a bag slot but gives you a pretty potent damage boost. I had already purchased the Armor Charm which does the same thing, but for your defense stat. These apparently open up once you have fought the Zorah Magdaros final form and cost 24,000 zenny for the Armor Charm and 36,000 zenny for the Power Charm. Later through the magic of crafting you will be able to turn these into Talons… and then re-buy the Charms again… but for now I should be set for the early High Rank content. I’m up to the Tickled Pink quest which is to hunt a High Rank Anjanath, which I simply was not ready to deal with mentally last night and wound up wandering off to do other things.
Instead I popped over to burn through some quests in MTG Arena, where I seemed to have a ton that wanted me to cast White spells. I had picked up the Eternal Thirst deck as one of my freebies, and I decided to start playing around with it. I have to say… for a weird Cats and Vampires concept I am really digging it. Unless you are also playing against a deck with stupid life gain powers… you can do some come from behind nonsense with this one. I feel like I need to tune it a bit and swap some cards, and could ultimately make a super powerful deck out of it. For the purpose of questing though… it had plenty of white cards so it allowed me to whittle that down in a few turns. This morning I noticed I had another freebie deck available and unlocked the Blue/Green Merfolk deck… which included a single copy of one of my favorite cards… Jadelight Ranger. I am hoping that one of the decks they end up throwing my way is the Explore matters deck that we originally had in Alpha. Mostly I don’t want to spend the proxies on rebuilding it if they are going to give me like 90% of the cards in a few weeks as we keep rotating through unlocking free decks.
I was all over the place this weekend as far as gaming time spent. I would say that largely this was the weekend that I did not play World of Warcraft… but that isn’t entirely true. I logged in every day and did my Emissary quest, and then last night while watching Fear the Walking Dead season finale I was piddling around on my Draenei Paladin. Past that however I didn’t end up doing much in the game I had until now been almost exclusively playing. This weekend saw a major resurgence of Monster Hunter World, in part because they are just about to release the Wyvern Ignition blade quest to the PC crew and I want it. In fact the Fall Festival event has a bunch of the quests all lumped together at once and I plan on trying to pick them up as well. That means unfortunately I have to be able to get my way to High Rank, which also means I am going to need to play in a more focused manner than I am used to.
Weirdly enough I have found myself lately favoring the Hammer instead of the Long Sword. While I am still maintaining a collection of swords and effectively keeping both weapons up to date… I am finding that there are just some monsters that become easy to farm with the hammer. Namely Radobaan is nonsense easy with a hammer, and the stupid spin attack off of a surface is amazing in a whole lot of situations. Right now I am largely sticking to the Iron line of hammers because it allows me to craft them fairly easily… and also sets me up for a Nergi hammer at some point. I am up to the point in the quest chain where I need to hunt a Rathalos and a Diablos… which will be challenging I am sure but also doable given I have beaten both of them multiple times. Diablos should be considerably easier with a hammer than I am used to with Longsword. The other weapon that I want to craft at some point in the switch axe, which is something I played with and enjoyed at high level but never really messed with at the lower levels. If I am remembering correctly… Zorah Magdaros is immediately following the quest chain I am on and then I will be moving into High Rank territory. If I put my mind to it I should be able to wrap that up before the event starts I believe Thursday or Friday.
The other game that I have been playing a shocking amount of lately is Magic the Gathering Arena. On September 27th they launched the Open Beta and with it in theory the last of the card resets. Since then I have started tinkering with decks and have a few reasonable options…. but honestly mostly find myself playing Stompy Green/Steel Leaf Champion or my Mono Black Burn deck. The first I am still tuning but the Mono Black Burn is still performing like a champ, but since it was built before the advent of Guilds of Ravnica it could probably be greatly improved with a few cards that are now available and with splashing another color. Assassin’s Trophy is still the champion of the new expansion so far, but I am also loving a bunch of cards like the Nullhide Feerox and as far as one drops go… I love Pelt Collector that increases in potency as you start summoning bigger creatures.
They had a freebie event this weekend that allowed you to create a singleton deck and so long as you got a single win… you got an uncommon or better card. This netted me several mythics and rares, but also served to keep me engaged and grinding. Unfortunately they allowed Rat Colony decks… which by rules can have any number of copies of the card rat colony… so essentially when you get matched up with one of those you might as well concede out because there is no way your janky singleton mess can keep up with it. I also had a large number of wins under questionable terms this weekend… namely there were several times when I got an awful lot of damage out of Llanowar Elves. I am not exactly proud of this moment when I enchanted one with Blanchwood Armor to ultimately win the game. Guilds of Ravnica sealed was a heck of a lot of fun and I went 3/3 with my deck… the prime problem being that my love of black and green keep me from drafting pretty much anything else. It isn’t that I cannot see the good in other colors… its just that my brain values those colors over pretty much anything else. I am in fact Golgari at heart.
In the “Game I didn’t expect to play” category… I was somehow busy enough during the tail end of the week to completely miss Dragalia Lost becoming a thing. As such on the podcast I was introduced to the game when all of the other members of the show were talking about it… then was super slow getting the podcast out because I kept spacing out while playing it Sunday morning. It is an awful lot of fun, but I am struggling with the same problem I have with other mobile games in thinking “this would be so much better if it were not a mobile game”. I think I largely just hate touch screen interfaces, and while this game is an awful lot of fun… the clunky nature of having to drag your finger around the screen makes it feel extremely awkward. If this were on the switch I would be completely hooked, but on a phone… you still have that barrier that I don’t like playing on my phone. The other problem I am encountering is it completely shreds my battery, so I guess I need to tweak down the settings to try and come up with a flavor that looks less pretty but doesn’t decimate my charge.
Lastly we have the podcast itself, that I named Gacha of Mana since Dragalia Lost reminded me so much of Secret of Mana. You have a brash guy, a blond girl, and some sort of a sprite thing that provides a lot of the comic relief. Anyways during the show we talk about Spiderman PS4, Magic the Gathering Arena Open Beta, Celeste, Dragalia Lost… and then a conversation about how the grind in Battle for Azeroth just feels lousy. The last part is largely why I had a weekend without much Warcrafting, as I am trying to limit my exposure to maybe extend the amount of time it takes me to angrily quit. I need to spend some time tonight doing Mythics, but in truth I have reached a point where that doesn’t even matter that much to me given it will be a box of disappointment on Tuesday.
Last night was one of those nights where I was driven by a purpose… one that was over relatively quickly. For the last month in Elder Scrolls Online there has been a Summerset expansion themed event where they have been challenging users to go out and get the Summerset Pathfinder achievement. For doing this the community could earn rewards… first a pet, then a mount and finally a nonsense house. It was the nonsense house that really drew me out of the woodwork and while I feel bad that I did not participate until we had hit 100%… I still wanted to get on and do the thing before the event expired which is I believe at some point today. I have no clue when I will actually get my baubles but regardless I did the thing and saw the really pretty land mass known as Summerset in the process.
Now I am going to go back to not questing there until I managed to make it there organically. I am really stubbon and weird about wanting to do content in the correct order… and even in systems that claim not to have a correct order… I try and determine the optimal order. For example in World of Warcraft Legion… the correct starting zone was Azsuna because that was the zone that had the first tier of profession quests (minus mining which was weirdly in Highmountain). So I always started characters there in order to get them access to tradeskills as quickly as possible. Similarly I could play the Star Wars the Old Republic content in any order I choose… yet I did the leg work to research the order in which it was released and have played through it in that fashion. This is effectively what I am doing in Elder Scrolls Online as well… because I am odd.
The other thing that I played a significant amount of last night was Magic Arena which as of yesterday went into Open Beta. Now several of us have been playing the Alpha and Closed Beta for awhile now, and are sorta sad to see our stockpile of cards go away. They did a big wipe of everything between the Alpha/Closed Beta phases and in theory will not do another wipe period (unless there is some catastrophic issue that comes up between now and release). I had enough gems that I managed to purchase my way back into my favorite deck so far… which is Mono Black Creature Burn. This is by no means my creation, but I do plan on spending some time tweaking it eventually, and maybe even trying to build in for paper magic as well. It only has a value of about $15 in physical cards so it is a pretty great entry level option that can be pretty brutal. I’ve never run up against anyone playing something similar, and I think the way it works catches a lot of players off guard because it does a lot of things that deal damage to the player but mean me in the process… allowing me to break out a Chainer’s Torment pretty early for a massive creature in the process at a stage of the game that they can’t really handle a 12/12.
That said it is completely weak to any sort of creature removal and you can chump block it for days… but the deck also has a bunch of flyers to get in and plink away at anyone with an army of ground creatures. If you end up with a board stall… there are cards like Fell Specter, Vampire Neonate and Vampire Sovereign that can hit the opponent directly without actually attacking. It has a good deal of hard creature removal, so you can sort of selectively remove their big bruiser. It doesn’t have any ramp to speak of with a bunch of one drops that deal significant damage quickly like Viscious Conquistador... that deals a point of damage to the opponent just by tapping them regardless of how combat resolves… it can add up fast. However in the above game the opponent lost because they got mana screwed… not because of some skill I had.
If you have ever played Magic the Gathering in the past, I highly suggest you check out Arena. Hearthstone is cool… but it isn’t Magic. This is finally Magic the Gathering for the Hearthstone world and does an amazing job of delivering fast and fun gameplay. You start off with a selection of Mono Color themed decks, and then each day there are quests allowing you to earn additional multi color decks… like today I picked up Chaos and Mayhem which is a themed Black/Red deck from the looks of it revolving around Rekindling Phoenix. I am hoping this means I will also get back my beloved Explore matters deck… either that or I will get the tokens needed to build it. One of the key differences between Magic Arena and Hearthstone is you get tokens that are good for one card of a specific rarity, instead of having a crafting system. In some ways this is awesome, because you can swap a mythic placeholder for any mythic of your choice… but there is no way to break down the cards you have no interest in to fuel the ones you do. Basically it is a trade off but the placeholder tokens seem to still be pretty prevalent. This makes getting a Mythic Placeholder feel awesome, because you know you can trade it for the card you actually wanted to pull from that pack.
Lastly it was requested that I get pictures of outdoor cat… this is from this morning when I went out to feed and he was so much more interested in nomming the food than getting his picture taken.
This is from awhile back when you can actually see a little bit of face to go with the gratuitous munching. It is a sweet baby, but unfortunately we are full up on cats… and another family has pseudo claimed him as theirs. If they do not however let him come inside as it starts to get colder we may have to change that stance and at a bare minimum let him become garage cat… since our girls likely would not take kindly to his presence.
Once again I did nonsense to finish out my weekly limited bounties in Monster Hunter World. The problem is my currently play times seem to be diametrically opposed to the play times of my friends who are currently playing the game. Most nights I start playing early in the evening… around 6 pm cst and am logging out around 9 pm when folks start to show up. As a result I have gotten used to doing things is really silly ways involving a bunch of random players. This weeks was weirdly harder than the 9 star quest in part because at the end of the day… people will likely always be farming Xeno’jiiva for parts and that quest is really hard to fail.
The 8 Star quest however is more or less Nergigante, Vaal Hazak, Teostra, Kushala Daora, and Kirin. All six of those have a pretty high threshold for failure so I feel like more often than not players are just doing them solo… something that I weirdly don’t enjoy that much. So instead I check the SoS Roulette and see what is available and ultimately managed to get all of them done with random players. The easiest was weirdly enough Kirin… which considering how big of a pain in the butt the tempered version was seemed like it would have been the hardest. The most challenging is generally Nergigante because if you get players who legitimately need to fight him… they are more often than not simply unprepared for how much harder he is going to hit them than what they are used to.
The truth is I need to start farming Nergi for parts because there are several weapons I would love to be able to make that require copious amounts of bits. Last night I managed to craft the first version of the Nergi Sword and Shield, because in truth that is probably the weapon I am most comfortable with if I don’t have my longsword. I spent some time earlier in the week playing with Gun Lance because also as part of the weeklies I needed to kill a bunch of Fanged Wyvern… which mean’t I could kill that green punching bag Great Jagras over and over. I think its a weapon I could get used to with time, and I managed to pick up a couple of reasonable options during the Kulve Taroth event. Still very much in love with this game and hoping they give us some more surprise events soon… because I can sorta see an end to what I actually deeply want to be farming.
The rest of my evening last night was spent poking around with my Fauxlgari Exploratic deck which is a tweaked version of Golgari Exploration… one of the stock decks that come with MTG Arena. It is not the most successful thing in the world for me, but I enjoy playing it and if it is not going my way pretty early on I concede out to move on to the next battle. If everything goes as planned you end up with a few really powerful creatures that keep growing each round, combined with Lurking Chupacabra that you can use to start taking out critters on your opponents side. It isn’t perfect and I am sure I should tune it some more. Right now I feel like I am playing with way too much land because I have had moments where all I am drawing is land for way too many rounds in a row. Regardless I find the whole experience of playing it enjoyable and I can lose hours just plinking away at other players.
I think that ultimately is going to the role MTG Arena plays for me… just letting me play magic when I want to play it. For whatever reason MTG Duels and the year branded Planeswalker games always felt really limited in the types of magic I wanted to play. They were shadowboxed in on a specific number of sets and as a result it felt more limited than what we already have in Arena. I like just sitting down and playing, regardless of the win condition. Sure it gets frustrating when you go on a losing streak when you are one win away from being done for the day… but even then the simple playing of cards makes me happy. It is something I have missed more than I realized… simply because I don’t have access to a lot of MTG players right now. I play to have fun and my version of fun is not exactly drift compatible with the meta. I enjoy bad magic.
